"where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling"

They can probably still sell software there. The problem is that too few people overall are using Linux.

It looks a lot like the recent record-breaking enshittification of Windows may be a subtle ploy to deprecate it and shift everything over to Linux.

Consider that this "Linus Poettering" turned out to be a Microsoft mole as the conspiracy theorists always maintained that he was. Some say RedHat as a whole was created by Microsoft.